Fabrication of carboxymethyl cellulose and graphene oxide bio-nanocomposites for flexible nonvolatile resistive switching memory devices

Nowadays the development of natural biomaterials as promising building polymers for flexible, biodegradable, biocompatible and environmentally friendly electronic devices is of great interest. As the most common natural polymers, cellulose and its derivatives have the potential to be applied in the devices owing to the easy processing, nontoxicity and biodegradability. Here, write-once-read-many-times resistive switching devices based on biodegradable carboxymethyl cellulose-graphene oxide (CMC-GO) nanocomposite are demonstrated for the first time. The hybridization sites formed by the gelation of CMC and GO molecules contribute to the excellent memory behaviors. When compared with devices base on pure GO and CMC, the device with the Al/CMC-GO/Al/SiO₂ structure exhibits brilliant write-once-read-many-times (WORM) switching characteristics such as high ON/OFF current ratio of ˜10⁵, low switching voltage of 2.22 V, excellent stability and durability. What's more, the device shows high flexibility and good resistive switching behaviors even with soft PET substrate (Al/CMC-GO/Al/PET structure). This newly designed cellulose-graphene oxide-based polymer nanocomposites are quite cheap and easy processed for large scale manufacturing of memory devices and can further contribute to future biodegradable data storage applications such as portable stretchable displays, wearable electronics and electronic skins in the coming age of artificial intelligence.